AMD Adds Low Framerate Compensation For FreeSync

November 25, 2015September 5, 2016by Dan Hamilton

AMD has released it’s new Radeon Software Crimson Edition and with it has brought improvements in graphics performance in a variety of ways. Amongst these improvements is the much-anticipated frame doubling feature called Low Framerate Compensation (LFC). To be clear this is not the first time this type of technology has been released as NVIDIA’s G-Sync has already had the feature present since its launch. This was possible because of the embedded hardware module that comes with every G-Sync monitor. Since AMD’s FreeSync does not have its own module the company has resorted to using software to implement this function.

With this new LFC feature whenever a game’s frame rate falls under a the minimum refresh rate the graphics card output and refresh rate will automatically be adjusted in order to stop screen tearing and motion juddering. While the feature will be automatically enabled after you update we should note that LFC only works on FreeSync monitors in which the maximum refresh rate is equal to or 2.5 times greater its minimum refresh rate. For example, if you’ve got a newer FreeSync monitor with a 40Hz to 144Hz range then you are good to go otherwise you’ll have to sit this one out.

Previously when a game was played with V-Sync on and the frame rate fell below the refresh rate the monitor wouldn’t have screen tearing, but it would still suffer from motion judder. Now with LFC the judder is eliminated and the motion is smooth. When the frame rate falls below a certain minimum while playing a game without V-Sync it previously ran into screen tearing and low motion judder problems while now with LFC both these will be reduced.